Show, Don’t Tell

Show, Don’t Tell

Current word count: 37,548

New words written: 1,722

Words til goal: 2,452 / 129 words a day til the end of September

My writing has been zooming along. So close to finishing. Yay! This word count is two days of writing, but I love to see that “til the end of September” number come down. Still hoping to finish sooner, and I’m on track. We’ll see.

Although Gwen’s first book, Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, it was a novel stemmed from her time growing up in South Beach. But Homer’s Odyssey is her first true memoir. In this blog post, on this anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York, Gwen talks about the challenges she found when tackling the chapters about Sept. 11, and how what finally helped her was the good old dependable writing advice of show, don’t tell.

And here’s Gwen:

Gwen Cooper

I moved to New York from Miami in the late winter of 2001. Because it was located only a block from my office, I ended up taking an apartment only five blocks from the World Trade Center.

As the events of 9/11 unfolded, I was trapped in Brooklyn and away from my three cats, who were stranded in my apartment near Ground Zero. It took me several days to reunite with and rescue them. It’s an episode in my life that’s recounted in detail in two chapters of my new memoir, Homer’s Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned About Love and Life With a Blind Wonder Cat.

Writing a memoir is never easy. Possibly the greatest challenge is in constructing a cohesive, narrative thread from the seemingly random events that make up a life. There were many places in the manuscript where I struggled with what to include, what to leave out, and how to frame things so that the book as a whole would stay focused. The easiest thing to do in a memoir is meander. The hardest thing is to make a life story read like an actual story.

Perhaps nowhere was that struggle greater than in writing the chapters that dealt with September 11th. How could I keep my book on-subject when dealing with a subject that would so naturally overshadow everything around it? And how could I describe in detail a three-day period during which I was separated from my cats (who were therefore absent from that part of the narrative), when my cats were the purported subject of my memoir in the first place?

I knew the trap I was most likely to fall into was the impulse to discuss the “big picture;” to talk abut the ways 9/11 changed us as a nation and me as a person. Yet to do so would be a jarring departure from the tone of the rest of the book.

So I went all the way back to the basic rules of writing I learned in my first creative writing classes in high school. “Show, don’t tell,” was the mantra of just about every writing teacher I had. I realized that the best way for me to show it all (or, at least, as much of “it all” as one writer could accomplish) was to stay focused and tell almost nothing. I spent almost no time describing my emotional state, the concerns we all had as a nation for what this event meant for us long-term, or any other “big picture” concerns.

Instead, I tried to show the reader my visceral and immediate reactions to the things I saw that day, as well as my actions and efforts in the subsequent days as I struggled to rescue my cats. In this, I was very detailed.

There have been a small handful of readers who’ve taken exception to my recounting of 9/11—who feel that, because I didn’t talk about my emotional state, I didn’t have one, or that the one and only thing I cared about that day was reuniting with my cats.

But the overwhelming response has been incredibly positive. I’ve received hundreds of letters from readers who’ve said they found the 9/11 chapters to be the most compelling in the whole book, and expressing great sympathy and anxiety for the emotional state I hoped to convey even while I was resolutely not “telling” it.

Writing those chapters was my first experiment as a writer with tackling a subject as big as September 11th. But it’s reassuring to know that, no matter how large or intimidating a subject may seem to me as a writer, the elementary rules still apply: Keep your focus small. Concentrate on the details. Don’t exposit the thing to death. Create a small window from which your reader can look out and see the whole view.

And, above all, always show. Never tell. Sometimes it’s good for us to remember that everything is possible as long as we don’t stray too far from the basics.

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Gwen! My husband and I are reading your book right now, and we LOVE it. And, we LOVE Homer. He sounds so incredibly adorable…we read your book for hours, out loud, on our 8-hour drive to Kansas City (and back again) over Labor Day. We missed our own kitty (Remy) so much, since he had to stay behind, but it was so wonderful to read about amazing little Homer.

We haven’t gotten to the chapters about 9/11 yet, but I can only imagine how sad and worried you must have felt away from Vashti, Scarlett, and of course, Homer. 🙁

Congratulations to you, too, on being so close to your word count. You should be able to knock the rest of that out in no time! Thanks for posting this interview with Gwen, because as I wrote to her, I’m loving her book! I have you (and the product placement people at Barnes & Noble) to thank for introducing Homer’s Odyssey to me. 🙂

Oh my goodness. We just finished the 9/11 chapters – you did a wonderful job with such tough memories. Whoever claims you didn’t seem to have an emotional state just b/c you didn’t tell about it – they’re absolutely crazy. Both my husband and I felt your emotion the entire way through, and we both cried right there with you. We were so worried about the cats – it was hard enough just to read about it, let alone imagine you going through it. Wow.

Okay. Still not done with the book, but close. Still loving it. Thank you.